During medical procedures conducted in the fields of, for example, cardiology, vascular surgery and electro-physiology, as well as in most procedures that involve endoscopy, the instruments employed typically provide the medical practitioners with a great deal of information. This information, which is obtained from probes and sensors in and on the body of the patient, is usually presented to the medical staff on monitors or display screens arranged in their immediate vicinity. Indeed, a number of separate monitors and display screens are often arranged next to one another for this purpose. For example, three, four, or even as many as eight or even ten individual monitors or display screens may be mounted adjacent one another during such a medical procedure.
In order to ensure that all of the information, including images and data, is optimally presented to the medical practitioners during the conduct of such a procedure, it is usually necessary that the individual monitors or display screens be arranged as close as possible to one another. To ensure good comparison of x-ray images, for example, it can be important to eliminate gaps or spaces between the monitors, to avoid the distracting influence of light infiltrating from behind the display system.
One known solution to this particular problem is to cover gaps between the separate monitors with strips or profiles of extruded rubber. These form a mask or shroud around the edges and between the display screens. This arrangement has the associated problem, however, that the rubber strips between the monitors tend to accumulate dust and dirt, and this leads to difficulties ensuring a hygienic operating environment for such medical procedures.
For arrangements of monitors that do not use rubber strips, especially when there are two or more different types of monitors involved, the time and effort required to adjust or replace the monitors is typically quite high. In particular, it becomes a complicated procedure to align the screens and to ensure that there are no gaps between different types of monitors having different shapes and sizes.
To provide freedom of movement of the monitors themselves, and also to ensure freedom of movement of the medical staff around the monitors, the monitors are often attached to pendant-systems suspended from the ceiling of the room in which the procedure is to take place. Importantly, however, such pendant-systems often involve extended arm arrangements and can be susceptible to vibration or flexing during service. This, in turn, can lead to vibration and movement of the monitors.
It is therefore important that the mounting of such monitors and display screens be stiff and light so that the monitors themselves are susceptible to minimal vibration or unwanted movement during service, and so that any vibrations or movements which do occur can subside quickly for further undisturbed operation.
A number of systems have hitherto been developed for mounting display devices, such as LCD screens and computer monitors, in the home and in the office environment. Examples of such systems are described in the U.S. Patent Publications U.S. Pat. No. 7,316,378 B1, US 2005/068718 A1, US 2005/284991 A1, and US 2007/041213 A1. These known systems, however, generally do not satisfy all of the requirements demanded by the medical environment, including hygiene, adjustability, modularity, and rigidity of the system, as discussed above.